“Paul!” cried a muffled voice, and Paul blundered backwards into Callie.
“C’mon.” She pointed across the dim cubescape. “We can use the exit by Rick’s office.”
Paul let himself be dragged for a few steps, but then he dug his heels into the carpet. “Wait wait wait,” he said, in an urgent whisper. “Listen.”
The hammering on the door had stopped; the figure in the window had gone away.
“Paul, goddammit, let’s go” Callie said, but Paul clutched her tightly and said, “Shh!”
It was sometime in the middle of Friday night, possibly even early Saturday morning, and the office was lit only by two or three widely spaced fluorescent fixtures. A little more light leaked through the outside windows from the building’s bright security lights, but for the most part the empty cubescape before them was in twilight, obscured as if by a mist. All around them, filling the midnight silence of the cubicles, Paul and Callie heard a steady creaking and the muffled murmur of voices. Both of them lifted their eyes to the suspended ceiling. The panels seemed to be bulging and shifting the entire length and breadth of the room.
“They’re up there,” breathed Paul. “They’re in the ceiling.”
Simultaneously they broke into a run, down the aisle past Paul’s cube, then right into the main aisle toward the copy machine, booking as hard as they could go for the exit at the other end. Callie ran in long strides, knees up, fists clenched, pumping her arms like a sprinter. Paul hammered after her, each impact of his bare heels jarring him all the way up his spine. Callie disappeared round the next turn, and Paul raced around the corner and blundered straight into her, nearly bringing them both to the floor. Callie had braced her heels, her hands pressed against the cube walls on either side of the aisle. Ahead of them, just outside the door of Rick’s office, the lower half of a pale man swung from a square gap where a ceiling panel had been shifted aside. His legs wriggled and he slipped lower, dangling by his fingertips, the ceiling creaking painfully above him. Then he dropped silently to the floor, crouching nearly on all fours, his fingertips brushing the carpet. It was Boy G. He lifted his pale moon face to Paul and Callie; his eyes gleamed through the lenses of his glasses. He smiled, baring his serrated teeth.
“Are we not men?” he whispered.
Behind him, over Nolene’s low-sided cube, another ceiling panel was already opening up, and Paul clutched Callie around her waist and heaved her up the aisle back the way they had come. They stopped again when they saw the blur of another pale man dropping out of the ceiling near the door where they had come in. Closer still they saw yet another pale man ooze head first out of a black hole in the ceiling; he curled around the lip of the hole like a fat spider until he dangled by his fingertips and dropped out of sight. Along the far side of the room Paul saw a pair of round, buzz-cut heads bobbing rapidly along the cube horizon, scurrying up the aisle.
“In here,” whispered Callie, and she dragged Paul into the large cubicle called “the library,” because of the tall metal bookcase full of TxDoGS regulations in ring binders just inside the door. It was where Paul had first gotten a good look at Callie, as she slouched against the wide worktable and sorted the mail amid the litter of pens, pencils, staple removers, and scissors. Just inside the door Callie started to heave on the metal bookcase, and Paul helped her pull it over onto its side across the doorway with an almighty clang. Ring binders cascaded to the floor about their feet and flopped open. Callie crouched and started snatching items off the work surface, but Paul stayed on his feet, glancing wildly about them. All around the room now panels were opening up in the ceiling — some pulled back, some twisted askew, some tumbling out of the hole into the cube beneath — an irregular checkerboard of black squares out of which descended feet, hands, moon faces. Murmuring filled the room like surf as pale men in white shirts and ties dropped onto desktops, chairs, and the tops of filing cabinets, punctuating the darkness with soft thumps and bangs. As the men sank below the cube horizon, Paul could feel each thump in the floor through the bare soles of his feet. He heard desk drawers opening and closing, and scampering in the aisles. The murmuring began to swell up the aisles and over the edges of the cubicle where he was trapped with Callie, a clackety-clack rhythm like a train, over and over again in an awful, whispering chant, “Are we not men? Are we not men? Are we not men?”
A sharp, electric whine startled him, and he looked down to see Callie crouched just under the edge of the work surface, an array of office supplies clustered around her on the carpet — a heap of pencils like pick up sticks, a steel letter opener, an enormous stapler. She was feeding one pencil after another into an electric pencil sharpener, but she did not take her eyes off the ceiling. Paul glanced up at it himself. The panels over the cube were rippling, and Paul heard creaking and the thrum of some metallic strut or support. At an especially loud creak, he ducked under the work surface, squeezing in next to Callie. The pencil sharpener ground away. Neither one of them looked at the other.
“You’re a son of a bitch,” muttered Callie.
“What?” said Paul.
“You heard me.” She laid the sharpened pencils in a fan at her feet. “When Olivia bared my throat and Colonel handed you the knife,” Callie hissed, still watching the ceiling, “what took you so long to do something?”
“Callie, I don’t think this is the time.” The creaking in the ceiling shifted, and Paul saw one panel bulge and then another.
Callie turned on him, her eyes blazing with rage and hurt. “You had to think about it!” she shouted — so loudly, in fact, that all the other sounds around them — the patter of feet, the murmuring chant, even the creaking of the ceiling above — went completely silent. She wouldn’t take her eyes off him, and in the electric stillness, Paul touched her with a trembling hand.
“Aw, honey,” he said, “I’m an intellectual. I have to think about everything.”
The ceiling above the cube gave way, several panels all at once, and in a cascade of dust and shards of tile, J.J. fell cursing into the cube, landing hard on the little heap of tumbled ring binders.
“Fuuuuck!” he shouted, throwing his arms over his face as fragments of ceiling panel pelted him. Coated in white dust and still wearing his barbecue apron, he tried to stand, but his feet kept slipping on the loose binders. Paul jumped up from under the work surface and cast about for something to defend himself with. He snatched up a big three-hole punch with a weighted base, and cocked it over his shoulder like a club.
“You faggot,” panted J.J., trying to haul himself up by the toppled bookcase. “I knew you’d be trouble the moment I saw you.
“Stay back!” cried Paul, his voice shooting up an octave. The three-hole punch rattled in his grip.